Grant: Operating Grant

The importance of discovering reliable biomarkers of psychiatric illnesses is on the rise. A specific psychiatric disease is often not easily recognizable at onset and therefore a biomarker is needed to shorten the diagnostic procedure and target the proper treatment promptly. One major obstacle facing research in psychiatry and neurosciences in general is the investigation of the living brain in humans using non-invasive techniques. The retina has been tagged as an approachable part of the brain due to its common embryonic origin. Fortunately, it is possible to investigate retinal function using a non-invasive tool, namely the electroretinogram (ERG). Studying 105 patients affected by schizophrenia (SZ), we have recently discovered that the ERG parameters could identify SZ with high accuracy (90%). These discoveries have built upon our previous finding of some ERG anomalies in children having one parent affected by a psychiatric disorder. The finding of ERG deficits in these non-medicated healthy youths enhanced the potential of the ERG as a biomarker of SZ by upraising the utility of the ERG in early detection and prevention. However, it remains to see whether the ERG can recognize SZ right at the onset of symptoms. This will be verified in our proposed prospective study of youths and young adults at Clinical High Risk (CHR) for psychosis. At entry, each subject will obtain a probability of being a SZ case according to his/her ERG profile. Subjects will be seen again three years later when the diagnosis is stabilized. The ERG predictions will then be confronted with reality. We postulate that the ERG will have accurately predicted, three years earlier, the "correct" clinical diagnosis characterizing the patient three years later. Hence, our study will allow the validation the ERG as a new technology capable of quickly identifying SZ, thus avoiding the actual delay due to the instability in the natural course of clinical symptoms.